Making History Review

I got around to watching the pilot for this new highly-anticipated Fox half-hour time-travel comedy, and it’s a winner! The series follows three friends from two different centuries as they try to balance the thrill of time travel with the mundane concerns of their present-day lives. The first show has our two heroes travel back and forth between present-day and 1775 Massachusetts, when apparently something during the “Butterfly Effect” altered the start of the American Revolution, and everything is starting to appear a tad more British.

In the pilot episode, Dan (Adam Pally of The Mindy Project), a facilities manager at a Massachusetts college, drives out to Lexington, runs into a ditch and after the sound of lightning, emerges in 1775 Lexington. That night, he and his girlfriend, Deborah (Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl), run into two British soldiers, after which Dan realizes the American Revolution hasn’t started yet. Back in 2016, he recruits Chris (Yassir Lester), a history professor, to travel back in time to ensure the Revolution happens. 

I can see some real potential with this show, with each episode using a historic era to highlight the mores/attitudes and socio-political climate of the present. This series is off to a great start, and our two leads have a great chemistry; they play off each other quite well in your classic “Abbott & Costello”/”Laurel & Hardy” fashion.

On Rotten Tomatoes the series has a rating of 92% based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The site’s critical consensus reads, “A high concept gone silly, Making History makes the grade with contemporary humor for historical themes and a funny, cartoonish execution of a serialized plot.” On Metacritic, the series has a score of 64 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating “generally favorable reviews”